Maelzel's Chess Player

The automated chess player "The Turk," as depicted in an engraving.

"Maelzel's Chess Player" (1836) is an essay by Edgar Allan Poe exposing a fraudulent automaton chess player called The Turk, which had become famous in Europe and the United States and toured widely. The fake automaton was invented by Wolfgang von Kempelen in 1769 and was brought to the U.S. in 1825 by Johann Nepomuk Mälzel after von Kempelen's death.

Although it is the most famous essay on the Turk, many of Poe's hypotheses were incorrect. He also may or may not have been aware of earlier articles written in the Baltimore Gazette where two youths were reported to have seen chess player William Schlumberger climbing out of the machine.^[1] He did, however, borrow heavily from David Brewster's Letters on Natural Magic.^[2] Other essays and article had been written and published prior to Poe's in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Boston - cities in which Poe had lived or visited before writing his essay.^[3]

Background

Poe's essay was originally published in the April 1836 issue of the Southern Literary Messenger.^[4]

Poe's essay asserts that Maelzel's troupe of automata had made at least one previous visit to Richmond, Virginia "some years ago", at which time they were exhibited "in the house now occupied by M. Bossieux as a dancing academy". Yet, very oddly, Poe gives no precise date or location for his own more recent encounter with Maelzel's Chess-Player, apart from stating that it was exhibited in Richmond "a few weeks ago". No known 19th- or 20th-century biography of Poe discloses when or where in Richmond he witnessed the performance of the Automaton Chess-Player.^{[citation needed]}

This mystery was solved in 2007, with the publication of "The Clockwork Horror", a short story by F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre inspired by Poe's essay. In researching this story, MacIntyre tracked down contemporary issues of the Richmond Enquirer, discovering several references to the then-current activities of Edgar Poe and also finding advertisements in the Enquirer establishing that Maelzel's Automata were exhibited at the City Museum in Richmond from December 15, 1835, through January 2, 1836.^[5] These dates are clearly the "few weeks ago" which Poe cites in his essay. Sometime within that nineteen-day period, it is speculated that Poe visited Richmond's museum to witness the Chess-Player.

Importance

The essay is important in that it predicts some general motifs of modern science fiction.^[6] Poe also was beginning to create an analytic method that would eventually be used in his "tales of ratiocination",^[7] the earliest form of a detective story, "The Gold-Bug" and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue". This point is emphasized in that Poe did not suggest a human was operating the machine, but that a mind was.

Response at the time of its publication was strong. It elicited responses from the Norfolk Herald, Baltimore Gazette, Baltimore Patriot, United States Gazette, Charleston Courier, Winchester Virginian, and New Yorker (the last of which suggested the article's only fault was its excessive length).^[8]

Ambrose Bierce's 1909 short story "Moxon's Master" is about a chess playing automaton.

References

1. ^ Wimsatt, W.K. "Poe and the Chess Automaton" in On Poe: The Best of "American Literature". Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993: 82. ISBN 0822313111
2. ^ Rosenheim, Shawn James. The Cryptographic Imagination. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997: 100. ISBN 9780801853326
3. ^ Wimsatt, W.K. "Poe and the Chess Automaton" in On Poe: The Best of "American Literature". Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993: 84–85 ISBN 0822313111
4. ^ Sova, Dawn B. Edgar Allan Poe: A to Z. New York: Checkmark Books, 2001: 146. ISBN 081604161X
5. ^ MacIntyre, F. Gwynplaine in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror (Stephen Jones, editor) London: Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2007: 338–339. ISBN 9781845294816
6. ^ Rosenheim, Shawn James. The Cryptographic Imagination. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997: 101. ISBN 9780801853326
7. ^ Krutch, Joseph Wood, Edgar Allan Poe: A Study in Genius, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926: 99.
8. ^ Wimsatt, W.K. "Poe and the Chess Automaton" in On Poe: The Best of "American Literature". Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993: 78. ISBN 0822313111

External links

• Timeline of publications at the Edgar Allan Poe Society online